When Mwanga wa Elimu was publicly inaugurated at eLearning Africa in Accra on 3 June, the workshop opened with young voices. That sequencing choice was deliberate, and it was a small early statement of a larger position: that a movement built to shape the future of African education needs the continent’s youngest people shaping it, not gathered around its edges as recipients of the results.
Africa is the youngest continent in the world. Over 60 per cent of the population is under 25, which means that the learners the Africa EdTech 2030 Vision and Plan is built to reach are, by definition, young, and it also means that the workforce that will build, teach, research, and fund the sector for the next 30 years is already in place. What is at stake in the question of youth voices is therefore not a matter of representation but of design.
The continental commitment to youth
The African Union has been explicit about the place of youth in the continent’s future. Agenda 2063, the AU’s 50-year continental development framework, states that “the creativity, energy and innovation of Africa’s youth shall be the driving force behind the continent’s political transformation.” That commitment sits at the top of the continental architecture which Mwanga wa Elimu operates, alongside the Africa EdTech 2030 Vision and Plan and the wider set of AU strategies that shape what African countries are working towards together. It is a commitment the movement takes seriously and works to enact, rather than to invoke.
The challenge of designing at a distance
African EdTech has often faced a familiar structural challenge: the people closest to the design and financing of the sector have not always been the people closest to the classroom. That distance is not the fault of any single group, and it reflects the reality of how sectors develop when investment, evaluation, and policy leadership sit in institutions that are, by necessity, one or more steps removed from daily school life. The result across the sector has been a period in which substantial investment has produced less classroom-level change than the ambition of the work would suggest, and a growing recognition that closing the gap between decision and use is one of the sector’s most important design questions. Bringing the voices of those who have just left the classroom and those still inside it into the design conversation is one concrete way to do that.
Young Africans are already building the sector
The people building the sector are also, in significant part, young Africans themselves. African EdTech founders under thirty are not the future generation of the industry. They are a current generation, working on products in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra and Kigali, often building differently from incumbent providers precisely because they carry the classroom in living memory. The founder who left school six years ago and started a platform for the learners she wished had existed for her is not an unusual figure in African EdTech; she is close to typical among the sector’s newest ventures. Any movement that treats African EdTech as something to be built for young Africans, rather than substantially by them, has misread the shape of the sector it claims to be helping.
Localisation is another area where youth voices carry knowledge that the sector has been slow to use. Young Africans have grown up code-switching between English or French and the languages spoken in their homes, reading Twi, Swahili or Wolof text on their phones every day, adapting fluidly between formal and informal registers of literacy. They know how localisation actually needs to work at the level of interface, content, and interaction, not simply as a translation layer applied late in the product cycle. This is knowledge the movement’s shared foundation for African EdTech will need if it is to serve African learners in the languages they actually think in.
What mobilising youth means in practice
Two young voices carried the opening at the Mwanga workshop in Accra: Daryll Dufu, a recent Ashesi University graduate and Mo Ojikutu, the founder of the Nigerian EdTech platform FLOW. Between them, they covered two distinct positions in how digital learning reaches African learners: the graduate who has just come through the system and the founder building the tools. What they collectively showed is what happens when young voices are a part of the design conversation rather than reporting on it from outside.
For Mwanga wa Elimu, mobilising youth is one of the ways the movement is trying to work differently. The invitation from Accra remains open, and more young voices from across the continent are needed to carry the work forward. Are you a young African who wants to help shape the future of learning on the continent? Join the movement today.
